The American Epic

I remember many years ago visiting my grandfather, my mother's father, in San Diego. He was a plumber and lived in a trailer park. I think he wasn't expecting us, and when we came in, he had a book in his hand, which he set down to greet us. It was a paperback book, and I still remember the title: Bendigo Shafter.

I don't know why I remembered this title, maybe it was because it was an unusual one. I remember thinking that "shafter" was some kind of job, like on an oil rig or something. And maybe Bendigo was the place they were drilling.

Several years ago, I read the book myself. I think I must have been around the age my grandfather was when we visited him that day, give or take two or three years. I discovered that the title of the book was a man's name, and that the book, a western by Louis L'Amour, was about pioneers trying to establish a civilization in midst of a wilderness.

I was reading it because I had recently discovered the value--not to mention the pure please, of reading western novels. I had always had a low view of westerns, thinking they were, literarily speaking, cheap entertainment. Something great for a rainy day when you had nothing else to do, but not worth taking the trouble to seek out or spend much time on. There were so many other, important books to read. Who had time for these anyway?

I imagine I am not the only one who remembers these books laying around at an older relative's house. Cheap paperbacks, dog-eared, and looking like they were either bought used, or read several times. But even before I had re-evaluated such books, I bought them for my children. My oldest son read many of them, and my daughter, who has always had a love of horses, devoured them. I can still remember seeing my daughter's bookshelf with about 30 volumes, mostly by Louis L'Amour, but others also by Max Brand and Zane Gray. I was choosy about what my children read, but I don't remember why, at the time, I thought these books were deserving of my children's attention. But I know now.

The western novel has served American culture in the same way that Homer's Iliad and Odyssey served the Greeks, and in the same way that Virgil's Aeneid served the Romans: It told them who they were as a people. The Greeks defined themselves on the basis of the events of the Trojan War, a definition that was later expanded by the Greek tragic poets Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, as well as (in a different way) the comic poet Aristophanes. The Romans too saw themselves in the mirror which Virgil held up to them through his story of the hero Aeneas fleeing the burning city of Troy as it was sacked by the Greeks carrying his father on his back and with his son in tow.

Later (so the story goes), Aeneas founds Rome in what we now know as Italy.The seminal event in Greek history is the story of the Trojan War; the seminal event in Roman history is the story of the founding of the New Troy on the banks of the Tiber River.

What is the seminal event in American history?

We could say it was our founding. That is a great story in itself. But, more generally, the defining event of our history was the conquest of the American west. This was the event (a long series of events, actually) that defined our ideals and values as Americans and made us into the courageous, pragmatic, inventive people that we became.

When you read the stories of our nation's role in the wars of the twentieth century, you get a sense of why our armed forces were so effective. The young men who were drafted out of small towns across the country—young men who grew up helping their fathers fix the farm equipment, or who turned a wrench at the local car repair shop, or who cooked at the local diner—these were the same young men who were sent to Normandy and invented a device on the spot that could allow American tanks to squeeze through the hedgerows; and who were sent to the Pacific as members of the Seabees, the special Naval engineer corps who could repair an airplane runway bombed into oblivion by the Japanese and have it up and running in two days.

Or, at least, this was the people we were. In recent decades, decades that have made us soft and lacking in cultural confidence. This, I think, is both caused and is the result of the decline of the western literature. If you read anything about the Greeks or Romans, you will know of the importance they gave the stories of their civilization. These were not just stories of their civilizations, but they were they way they passed on their civilization to succeeding generations.

America without the western is like Greece without Homer, or Rome without Aeneas, which is to say, they would not be Greece and Rome at all.Civilization is precarious thing, and it is through stories, both about real and imaginary things, that it is passed on.